Salad is, of course, the main source of vegetables in ordinary western food, and many restaurants will also attach a side dish to dinner, including many choices of cooked vegetables, such as steamed or baked strip vegetables.
In addition, some people become vegetarians for personal reasons, environmental protection ideas or health pursuit. Restaurants will certainly add vegetarian options to the menu if they want to do business. Some restaurants, with the call of green food and healthy food, have actually become specialized vegetarian restaurants.
1. Types of vegetarian food
The word "vegetarian" is ambiguous in both Chinese and English. Different people have different understandings of vegetarianism and different requirements for the degree of vegetarianism.
The most common are vegetarian and vegan, both of which are vegetarian, and the latter is more strict than the former. Obviously, neither of these vegetarians can eat meat or meat products. The main difference lies in the difference between non-meat animal foods such as eggs and milk. Vegetarian vegetarians can include eggs and dairy products, while vegans can't. Let's call these two vegetarians "semi-vegetarians" and "vegetarians" according to the formulation of some lay people.
This is actually a big difference, because the amount of dairy products in western food is far more than that in Chinese food, and almost all dishes are flavored with dairy products such as cheese, butter and cream, so many vegan dishes are a big challenge for chefs, with completely different concepts and materials, which can be called brand-new creation.
At present, most small-scale restaurants will mark vegetarian or vegan dishes on their menus.
For non-vegetarians, it is normal to want to try vegetarian dishes once in a while. If it's just vegetarian, it's not a big problem. Just order vegetarian dishes. But if you see vegan's logo on the menu, you'd better know the ingredients used in this dish before ordering.
The first is oil. Not to mention olive oil and vegetable oil, butter cannot be used. If you replace butter with vegetable oil, it may not taste exactly the same, but it can also be made delicious. But if the store uses margarine instead of butter, it is recommended to think twice. Although margarine (margarine) is the most widely used and oldest butter substitute, it is a kind of artificial oil with high trans fatty acid content and is unhealthy.
As for cheese, the substitute is usually vegetarian cheese or vegan cheese, usually made in protein, and protein is a plant extracted from soybeans and nuts.
I haven't tasted vegetable cheese, so I can't evaluate its taste. However, due to the emergence of a large number of such substitutes in recent years to meet the growing health needs, the raw materials and production technology used are not as risky as margarine many years ago.
In fact, the process of making cheese with milk is similar to that of making bean curd in China. In earlier years, when overseas students in China introduced China cuisine to foreigners, they also translated tofu milk into tofu cheese. So I estimate that the current plant cheese is probably fermented in a way similar to making tofu milk.
By the way, there are some rare and demanding vegetarians. For example, fruitarian can be translated as "fruitism" in Chinese. As the name implies, in vegetarian diet, they only eat fruits and branches and leaves, and all parts that affect the life and growth of plants can not be eaten, such as roots, underground tubers, seeds and so on. Potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions, nuts, peanuts and so on can't appear in their recipes. After all, the number of people is limited, and the menu of the restaurant will not specifically provide such dishes.
salad
Most western food recipes put raw materials under the names of dishes. For salads with fresh vegetables as the main ingredients, it is simple and clear.
The most popular three-piece salad is nothing more than lettuce, tomato and cucumber. There are not many common cucumber varieties on the dining table in North America, but they are generally stout and have no too many bumps on the surface. There is a slender English cucumber (English cucumber), which tastes more crisp and tender. These are all good ingredients for salad. There is also a kind of dill cucumber, which is short and thin and is generally used to pickle pickles.
There are many kinds of tomatoes. Roman tomato, steak tomato, plum tomato and heirloom tomato are the most common tomatoes in North America. Among them, steak and tomato are hard and light in taste. No matter what ingredients you mix, you don't grab the taste. Can be said to be the most widely used tomato. Oval Roman tomatoes have a stronger flavor. Both are common ingredients in salads.
Cherry tomatoes (cherry tomatoes) are round, and grape tomatoes (grape tomatoes) are long, which can be added to salads to add color, especially cherry tomatoes.
When lettuce was first introduced to China, it was called salad in many places, which shows its position in salad. The most common is iceberg lettuce (iceberg lettuce), which is round and looks like cabbage. This kind of lettuce tastes crisp and slightly sweet. There is also a common kind of long-leaf lettuce, which is like Chinese cabbage. It is also crisp and tender, and has a stronger sweetness. Only cabbage heart is exquisite, that is, long cabbage heart.
Lettuce is a big family, there are many varieties with slender leaves, which are collectively called leafy lettuce, and some menus even write vegetables directly. Among many green leafy lettuce, I prefer argula, which is slender and surrounded by thick serrated leaves. This kind of vegetable leaves has a unique taste when bitten, but it should not be too much in a salad, otherwise it will cover up other vegetables.
In recent years, kale, a vegetable that has become more and more popular with the trend of healthy vegetarianism, has large dark green curly leaves and is almost a must-have for all new vegetarian restaurants. Not only do you make salads, but many entrees add this flavor, and some even fry them to make snacks. In terms of taste, I personally can't accept its rich taste.
Spinach (spinach) is also a common ingredient in salads, using extremely tender leaves. Cabbage is also very common, and it will definitely taste harder and more chewy. It can be divided into ordinary Chinese cabbage and red Chinese cabbage, the latter is bitter. Radicchio (Italian chicory) looks like purple cabbage, but it is smaller, with thin leaves, purple and white, and tastes more bitter.
In addition to leaves, there are many massive vegetables, including many varieties that are rarely eaten raw in Chinese food. Broccoli, carrots, green peppers, red peppers and red onions are all common. Celery (celery) is often eaten raw, but most of it is eaten directly in the sauce without salad.
In addition to the main vegetables, the menu will also introduce the sauces used. The sauce of salad is seasoning, not sauce. Common ones are French (France), Italian (Italy), Caesar (Caesar), ranch (farm), blue cheese and so on.
French and Italian are based on water and vinegar, the difference is that French is thicker tomato sauce, while Italian is thicker lemon juice, without adding tomato sauce, celery, thyme, basil and other herbs, and milk yellow mixed with green particles. The latter all have more cheese, milky white.
3. Vegetarian main course
Speaking of Italian food, I mentioned parmigiana (Parma Baked Eggplant) made of eggplant, which is just an example of eggplant food. In all kinds of mainstream western food in North America, eggplant can play a leading role in vegetarianism.
In addition to Parmesan cheese, there is also a Rolatini (Italian cheese eggplant roll) in Italian food, which is also a famous eggplant dish. Slice eggplant along the long side, dip it in flour or bread crumbs, spread a layer of whey cheese, roll it into a tube, bake it in the oven and pour the juice on the table.
It is also delicious to roast eggplant slices directly, and it can also stimulate the unique fragrance and thick taste of eggplant in the most primitive way. This is roasted eggplant. Not only can it be roasted directly, but also the meat quality of eggplant is suitable for baking in the oven with bread crumbs and cheese powder, making it into baked eggplant with skin.
It's also good to make fillings, such as putting eggplant on pizza or putting grilled eggplant in sandwiches. The reverse is also possible. For example, when making lasagna, eggplant is used instead of dough, and cheese and tomato sauce are sandwiched between several layers of eggplant, which is also a rare vegetarian delicacy.
In these methods of baking and adding eggplant, zucchini (Italian cucumber, similar to zucchini in northern China) can also be used instead of eggplant, which is based on its taste and the fragrance of vegetables. The cabbage rolls originally wrapped in meat can also be replaced with fillings such as cheese and tofu to become vegetarian.
Cauliflower is also a common ingredient in vegetarian diet. Baked California flowers (roasted cauliflower) with cheese and seasoning. The fragrance of the ingredients can't cover up the sweetness of cauliflower itself, which has soft tendons and tastes quite good. This dish can be crispy and attractive. Cut the whole cauliflower horizontally, take the thick slice with the largest diameter in the middle and cook it like a steak. This is California steak, which has a unique taste.
Vegetarian food is inseparable from mushrooms. Many dishes in ordinary restaurants are mainly made of mushrooms. Mushrooms, as advanced raw materials in vegetarian food, are naturally indispensable, adding unique delicacies to relatively plain vegetarian food. Stuffed mushrooms (stuffed cheese) and mushroom soup (mushroom soup) are excellent appetizers, while pizza and pasta can use mushrooms as ingredients.
4. Artificial meat
Vegetarian restaurants for Chinese food are often attracted by imitation meat. All kinds of barbecues and grilled fish are made of potatoes, bean products, wax gourd, konjac and other ingredients. Color, fragrance and taste are all good and can be confused.
Vegetarian food in western food, especially the healthy vegetarian food that has emerged in recent years, also has the demand of imitating meat. Hamburgers, chicken chops and even steaks all have vegan imitations.
Similar to Chinese food, the imitation meat of western food is also made of a large number of vegetables with high plant protein content such as beans. Lentils (lentils), chickpeas (chicken peas) and other ingredients are widely used in western food. There are many ingredients in soup, sauce and salad when cooking. The practices of Latin America and India are also integrated into the mainstream cuisine of North America, which greatly increases the way beans are eaten.
Vegetarian hamburgers in vegetarian restaurants are a big problem. Ordinary hamburgers, that piece of meat pie has a lot of attention, such as the thickness of meat, the proportion of fat and thin, the amount of starch, how to cook it, and how to make the finished product tender, smooth and juicy. Every family has its own secret recipe. It is difficult to do this with vegetable meat or substitute meat.
From the taste point of view, it is difficult for plant fibers to achieve the toughness of animal muscles, and the taste is delicate and soft, which can not reach the bite strength of meat. In addition, the fat in beef melts slowly in the mouth, and the entrance can quickly wrap the mouth, making people full of fragrance. To imitate this effect with vegetable oil, only palm oil and coconut oil with relatively high melting points can barely do it. At present, the main imitation meat products on the market are made of coconut oil, but they are still not as fat as beef itself.
Color is also a problem. The red color of meat itself is difficult for beans to imitate. All kinds of beans are dark after cooking, so red natural plant dyes such as beet juice have to be added. As for fragrance, plant products can't imitate meat without perfume crystals.
In the process of making imitation meat, major manufacturers have racked their brains and collected some traditional Asian recipes. Danbei, a traditional bean product in Java, Indonesia, is one of them. This is a product that cooked soybeans are fermented by fungi and wrapped with banana leaves. Some vegetarian restaurants now imitate fried fish with lobster sauce, and fans even try to develop various foods with lobster sauce.
Generally speaking, I am not satisfied with all kinds of imitation meat I have eaten. If you want to try vegetarian food, or choose the real vegetarian food in front, it will make you more amazing than imitation meat.